Large area’s of the Middle East and Asia are without the Internet today due to what some believe is a severed cable in the Mediterranean Sea between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

An official at Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that a boat’s anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to repair the fault.

This is pretty amazing if you think about it: Nearly the entire Middle East and India rely on 1 underwater cable for over 50% of their Internet access (IE connection to the outside world). We’re really not that far from the days of a single Transatlantic Cable that was prone to snapping. Of course there are backup systems in place for critical communications where Satallite’s will do but for the average business and consumer this cable is thier sole source of information. Good to know a small boat with an anchor can still reek havoc on the modern world.

In the mean time good luck calling any kind of technical support that resides in India.

Series of tubes my ass.